PLUS Malaysia Keeps Traffic Moving by Neutralizing Cyber Threats with Rubrik Security Cloud

Overview

PLUS is the vital backbone of Malaysia’s transportation infrastructure, connecting the northern border with Thailand to the southern border with Singapore. It links all major airports, seaports, and towns across Peninsular Malaysia, serving over 32 million citizens. As the largest expressway concessionaire, PLUS facilitates the safe and efficient movement of people, goods, and essential services, with traffic volumes reaching 1.7 million vehicles daily and swelling by over 30% during holidays. The need for robust cybersecurity measures became starkly apparent when a peer organization fell victim to a ransomware attack, leading to significant operational disruptions and revenue loss. This incident highlighted the vulnerabilities in the transportation sector and prompted PLUS to reevaluate its cybersecurity posture.

Solutions

Future proofing through extended protection

PLUS has an extensive network infrastructure for collecting payments at cashless toll plazas and rest areas along its expressways. This infrastructure also supports traffic control, toll gates, and emergency response for all of Malaysia. “The PLUS mobile app allows our customers to plan their journey, check traffic, redeem loyalty offers for our 3 million loyal PLUSMiles rewards program members, and so much more,” says Vincent Leo, Head of Digital Initiative Studio. “Our services are an integral part of Malaysians’ daily lives—that is why it is imperative our infrastructure be resilient to serve our citizens day in and day out.”

A cloud-first organization and one of Asia’s largest Microsoft Azure users, PLUS hosts 90% of its workloads on Azure and Microsoft 365. The company initially planned to rely on Azure backups; however, the ransomware attack on its peer concessionaire highlighted the need for more comprehensive data protection for its cloud environment. 

With Rubrik cloud-native protection, PLUS has a unified single pane of glass for both on-prem and cloud data, immutable and air-gapped backups, as well as cost efficiencies, being able to take advantage of low-cost long-term storage with intelligent tiering and deduplicated data archival. 

Rubrik also enables PLUS to safeguard years of critical M365 data, beyond the default 30-day period limited by M365 backups, ensuring business continuity even in the case of hardware failures. Leo highlights, “Rubrik gives us the flexibility to pinpoint and recover individual emails or SharePoint and OneDrive files for our customers. The precision search and recovery features have improved the customer experience by streamlining the restoration of lost emails and files.”